Judge Patrick Robinson immediately shut down a Western journalist on the Hague Tribunal witness stand last week, when she disclosed having seen Osama bin Laden waltz into the office of late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic in November 1994.

Just as veteran British journalist Eve-Ann Prentice, who covered the Yugoslav conflicts for the Guardian and the Times told of the famous OBL, Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice objected, and the judge “…cut off the testimony immediately declaring it ‘irrelevant,’” according to the defense’s recap of a devastating day of testimony.However, considering that the defendant, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was trying to make a case that the Bosnian Serbs were fighting because Izetbegovic wanted to create an Islamic state that would not be particularly tolerant of Serbs, it would seem that this “explosive” mention of his connection with the world’s most wanted man would in fact be quite relevant.

According to the report, while Prentice was waiting in Izetbegovic’s foyer for an interview she, and a journalist from Germany’s Der Speigel, “saw Osama bin Laden being escorted into Izetbegovic’s office… needless to say this evidence did not sit well with the tribunal.”

Prentice was by no means the first to make the bin Laden-Bosnia connection. Izetbegovic’s plans for making Bosnia an Islamic state were long known, and the fact that there was a strong foreign mujahedin presence in Bosnia, would both indicate that her squelched testimony was highly relevant indeed.

However, as in all the other tribunals designed to bolster the Official Truth established by government interests – not least of all the 9/11 Commission – evidence such as hers is blotted out immediately or blocked in advance.

And vitally, the mass media has lost interest too, now that the “good news” has stopped flowing in like it used to, when the prosecution against Milosevic had the momentum. Since the former Yugoslav president has taken the offensive, however, Western media coverage has stopped altogether, expect for the occasional report fearing that his various illnesses might interfere with “justice” being done.

However, though the big media did not cover the testimony, the always pro-intervention IWPR at least had to react to the damaging testimony. In a recent article, it cited Prentice’s impartiality- and then proceeded to act as a mouthpiece for the prosecution, stenographing Mr. Nice’s use of quotes from Prentice’s own book to show that even she was aware of Serbian evils.

But the IWPR didn’t mention bin Laden, nor various other important details that emerged from Prentice’s most damaging testimony, on the Kosovo conflict. Unlike the Western journalists who were merely waiting on the Macedonian border to hear the after-the-fact (or fiction) testimony of refugees, she was actually in Kosovo. In fact, owing to her proximity to the depleted uranium bombs NATO was dropping all around her, Prentice later became ill with cancer.

Having interviewed hundreds of ordinary Albanians, Roma and Turks during the war, Prentice’s first-hand fieldwork suggested that many of the Albanian refugees were forced to leave their homes not by the Serbian army but by the KLA- which cynically hoped to provoke Western outrage at an allegedly Serb-caused refugee crisis. It worked.

Prentice’s first-hand experience also contradicted the Official Truth on a number of other fronts. While the Hague prosecution accused the Serbs of bombings in Gnjilane, Istok (Dubrava Prison), Orohovac, and Meja, she stated that NATO bombing raids were responsible. “In the case of Meja… Ms. Prentice spoke to several victims in the hospital and they told her that NATO had bombed them. While she was in Gnjilane she did not see any evidence of the deliberate burning of shops and houses alleged by the indictment. All she saw was the destruction caused by NATO.”

Further, “…the indictment says that Serbian troops forced the Albanian population to leave Prizren from March 28th onwards. But Ms. Prentice said that there were a lot of Albanians in Prizren while she was there in May.”

The disinterest of Western leaders in the full reality of the wars in Yugoslavia reappeared with one telling vignette. When speaking about Bosnia, Prentice spoke of a visit to Pale, where “…she was surprised to find that a large number of non-Serb refugees were being given shelter there. Before she actually visited Bosnia she had believed what the rest of the media told her about the Serbs.”
Apparently, so did her country’s leaders:

“…she recounted one occasion where she tried to convince Robin Cook to visit Pale so that he could see for himself that non-Serbs were living freely in the Bosnian-Serb capital. Cook, who was on a fact finding mission, told her that he would not visit Pale because he thought the Serbs were ‘monsters.’”

Needless to say, the IWPR report doesn’t mention this vignette. Nor did it mention that Prentice contracted cancer from NATO’s depleted uranium bombing. It did make a subtle but determined effort to disparage her testimony, however- just as it has in the past given sympathetic attention to prosecution witnesses who later turned out to be liars. Some things just come with the territory for media bodies funded by the same governments that created the Hague monstrosity to begin with.